Information you provide
Health Signal Africa stores the details needed for a reader account, including your account name and email address. Passwords are handled by WordPress. Saved articles, followed topics, followed publication profiles and preferences are linked to your account. Contact, contributor, correction and commercial forms store the information submitted in private enquiry records. Please avoid patient identifiers, confidential medical records and other sensitive material in general-purpose forms.
Newsletter requests and consent
A newsletter request stores an email address, the request status and a consent record. Requests remain pending until confirmation. Confirmation and unsubscribe links use tokens to process those actions. Only confirmed subscriptions belong in the confirmed subscriber export. Newsletter delivery may involve a service configured by the publication; the service and its role should be recorded here when connected.
Cookies and site operation
WordPress uses necessary cookies for signed-in sessions and account operation. Public content can be read without an account. Hosting and security services may maintain technical logs needed to operate the site. This notice does not claim that a third-party analytics or advertising tracking service has been connected. If those services are introduced, this notice and the relevant consent controls must be updated before use.
Article reading statistics
Health Signal records aggregate article views and engaged reads by article and date. An engaged read means at least ten seconds with the page visible and progress through at least 75% of the article. The browser uses session storage flags to reduce repeat counts within a tab session; no analytics cookies or persistent visitor identifiers are created. The statistics table contains article IDs, dates and totals, not email addresses or raw IP addresses. A short-lived keyed hash of the network address limits excessive event requests for five minutes. Browsers requesting Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control do not send reading events. Signed-in editorial staff are excluded by the website script. Counts are approximate activity measures rather than unique people: blocked scripts can reduce counts, and direct automated requests can inflate them. No third-party analytics service receives these reading events.
Access and retention
Private enquiries are available to authorised administrators. The default enquiry retention setting is 365 days, after which the plugin moves eligible records to WordPress Trash. Administrators remain responsible for handling final deletion, backups and applicable retention obligations. Saved reporting and preferences remain associated with an account until changed or erased. WordPress privacy tools support export and erasure of the plugin’s personal records.
Questions and requests
Use the contact form to ask about information held by the publication, request an export or raise an erasure question. Provide enough information to identify the account without sending a password. A request may require an identity check before private account information is disclosed. The operating publisher should maintain its legal identity, processor details and any changes to this notice. This page describes the implemented site practices and is not a statement that an external legal audit has taken place.